Survival of the (Traditional)Fittest

I was reading a book called Empire of the Summer Moon at my parents place.  It’s a story on the fall of the Comanche people, a tribe of which I am descended through on my father’s side.

My dad looked at it and said “That about our people?”

“Yup.  We were pretty awful.”

“Yeah.”

My mother tutted this, she said we can’t escape our culture’s various pasts.  She’s a Jew, raised me a Jew…if you know much about Jews, the talk went to Jews.

My mother is a very progressive and optimistic Jew.  She believes Judaism in its perfect form is simply a religion, assimilated and accepted by whatever nation the Jew resides in.  She thinks it is detrimental for Jews to cling to their cultural mores and insular nature.

My mother is at heart an optimist.  My father and I, when it comes to morality and hope are…practical folks.  So it ended up turning into gentile dad and cynical Jewish son vs. Optimistic Jewish mother.

All the cultural traits of Jews exist for a reason, and these traits while setting Jews apart, and causing them to be hated even in 2011, lets it keep existing.

Jews are not unique in any sense in this way, the quirkier, more insular cultures survives.  Asians have managed to keep a strong cultural identity alive in America by being insular, by being apart from the mainstream.  It causes the ‘mainstream’ to cock their heads and sneer, and keeps the culture going.

But a culture can not survive on its oddness and exclusivity alone.  Like any organism when the environment changes, it must change too.  These survivor cultures seem to achieve this by creating an untouchable, non-malleable core of values and belief, and let everything outside of that warp, twist, wither and grow as needed for the times.

The Comanche people were able to keep a strong, insular, distinctive culture…right up to the moment they were wiped out and forcibly assimilated, and their mongrelized ancestors write blog posts about them.  They would not change for the world changing around them.  They went extinct proudly, but extinct nonetheless.

Culture, something out of thoughtful control, is like life.  It is neither good nor bad, meaningful or meaningless; simply effective or not.

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